Dan Ariely— The Upside of Irrationality, Introduction

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (Dan Ariely)

in a perfectly rational world, procrastination would never be a problem. We would simply compute the values of our long-term objectives, compare them to our short-term enjoyments, and understand that we have more to gain in the long term by suffering a bit in the short term.

We routinely behave as if sometime in the future, we will have more time, more money, and feel less tired or stressed. “Later” seems like a rosy time to do all the unpleasant things in life,

When the designers of modern technologies don’t understand our fallibility, they design new and improved systems for stock markets, insurance, education, agriculture, or health care that don’t take our limitations into account (I like the term “human-incompatible technologies,” and they are everywhere). As a consequence, we inevitably end up making mistakes and sometimes fail magnificently.

This is the real goal of behavioral economics: to try to understand the way we really operate so that we can more readily observe our biases, be more aware of their influences on us, and hopefully make better decisions.

Inventors, companies, and policy makers can take the additional steps to redesign our working and living environments in ways that are naturally more compatible with what we can and cannot do.

This is what behavioral economics is about—figuring out the hidden forces that shape our decisions, across many different domains, and finding solutions to common problems that affect our personal, business, and public lives.